pterjan's diary

Mageia 1 is out!

Almost 9 months ago, Mageia was forked out of Mandriva by many former Mandriva employees and contributors. At that time it did not exist yet, everything had to be done, but we are now happy to announce that it's ready!

The first technical work was to get a build system, and the result is pretty nice. With only 2 build hosts it is faster and more reliable than Mandriva's one, while reusing most of the code. The various improvements could have been done at Mandriva but having to deploy a new one (with less resources) is a good time to simplify the architecture and the code.

Then the massive work: importing rpm packages, fixing them as quite a few did not build, and cleaning them. The result is 7389 source packages (Mandriva has 12390, Fedora has 10283) and mageia 2 will probably have much more as only packages needed/requested by packagers and early testers were included.

More than the number of packages, the interesting data is that they all got built recently, and there are 0 broken dependencies or orphan binary packages! For comparaison Mandriva currently has 4059 src.rpm older than 6 months, 1065 binary packages without matching source, 4756 binary packages with broken dependencies.

Of course this could have bben done inside Mandriva again, but when you see a list of 4756 problems, and spend a week-end fixing 100, the list still look the same size. If you only have a few to fix then you can spend an hour fixing everything! Growing from a sane base is much better and easier than trying to cleanup the huge mess.

Given the amount of work to get everything in place, don't expect much bleeding edge stuff in version 1. No GNOME3, no switch to systemd, ... the goal was to have all the infrastructure and teams setup, and have a strong basis for a great version 2, and I think the result is quite nice!

All the teams did a great job, and thanks to everyone Mageia 1 is now out!

It is available as DVD, LiveCD or dual-arch CD as Mandriva used to be. Enjoy!